Life & Wisdom Quote by George Orwell

Orwell’s line is a grenade tossed into the comfy idea that myths are merely harmless stories we outgrow. He’s pointing at something more dangerous and more modern: belief doesn’t just interpret reality, it manufactures it. A myth, once collectively adopted, stops being a metaphor and starts behaving like policy, habit, and common sense. The power here is in the slippery verb: “tend.” Orwell doesn’t claim magic; he sketches a social mechanism. Enough people act as if something is true, and institutions, incentives, and fears rearrange themselves to make it effectively true.

The subtext is classic Orwellian cynicism about “reality” as a political asset. In his world, truth isn’t only a matter of evidence; it’s a matter of enforcement, repetition, and convenience. Myths become self-fulfilling prophecies: the nation that believes it is perpetually threatened will build a security state that finds threats everywhere; the society that “knows” certain groups are dangerous will police them into desperation, then cite the fallout as proof. Belief curdles into feedback loop.

Context matters: Orwell wrote in the shadow of propaganda machines, mass media, and ideological total war. He’d watched narratives harden into “facts” through coordinated messaging and social pressure, a theme that runs from his essays through Animal Farm and 1984. The line also works because it’s unsettlingly democratic: it doesn’t blame only dictators. It implicates crowds, dinner-table talk, and the everyday willingness to trade uncertainty for a story that feels coherent. The myth wins because it’s useful, not because it’s true.